Since I started as a Product Owner, I have not posted actively update on our features – and there is a good reason for that. We’ve been focusing building the new great user experiences in our products and that has taken a significant portion of my time. In this blog, I’ll highlight some of the coolest features that we’ve done lately, and I’ll finish off this with few teasers about new features that we are working on.

Testing for Enterprise Mobile Apps

Just last month, we enabled Bitbar Testing access and purchases for IBM Marketplace users and the products will be available in IBM Bluemix soon as well. IBM Marketplace is a cloud service platform allowing end-users to buy services, IBM products and third-party products to facilitate the creation of online services and mobile apps. We believe enterprise apps are one of the next ‘verticals’ where the agile mobile dev and test approach will make a big splash. There is an imminent need to ensure apps created and tailored for enterprises will work across a variety of different mobile (phones, tablets, and yet wearables) devices. Using real devices and selecting the right set of setups that end-users use is crucial and Bitbar offers an instant solution to this problem.

Comparison of Test Results with Help of Screenshots

When comparing test results produced by test automation it is important to review and compare all results in the right context. For example with test steps, it’s now very easy to compare screenshots between different device runs. Capturing screenshots during test execution is a great way to capture the essence of how test execution is progressing.

Naturally, as tests are executed on real devices, the test execution speed varies and some devices with more powerful CPUs will finalize tests earlier. Therefore, the comparison should be always done on test step level, especially when tests are done for graphics-intensive apps like games.

Using the screenshot compare by test steps provides a visually rich feature to quickly review the status of test runs, but it also provides a great way to inspect which devices spend more time on particular test steps. Failing devices stand out as they lack steps, results and screenshots when compared to successful device runs.

Presenting test execution results clearly is paramount. For this reason we started cleaning the different views showing the results of the test execution. In an effort to clarify the presentation of results we started with the project page, which now shows high-level information of the test execution. The user is able to see how many of the actually executed test cases passed and how many of the selected devices have already executed or are still running scripts. As before one is, of course, able to name the test runs or provide them with some tags. We continue fixing the results views in the next releases.

Selecting Only the Right Devices for Mobile App Testing

Bitbar Testing enables users to create specific device groups that are used to point out on which devices tests are executed. The device group configuration can be found under the main menu – Device Groups. This wizard-like widget allows users to create and manage a specific set of devices that can be quickly used for test runs. A device group can include either Android or iOS devices. Currently there is no possibility to run cross-platform tests with one test run.

Creating new device groups is now simpler than ever before. It is now a matter of drag and dropping devices to existing or new device groups – and removing works with one click too.

Fewer System Notifications and Popups To Distract Your Test Automation

On Bitbar Testing it is now possible to run Appium tests remotely using the Appium Client. With every new OS the iOS devices might start to present popups asking the user to upgrade the device OS. This typically brakes automated tests. With the latest release, all remote Appium tests (client-side Appium) are included with capabilities that discard notifications except if explicitly managed by the test.

With Appium autoDismissAlert and autoAcceptAlerts capabilities are used to dismiss notifications.

Admins Ahoy! New Available Administrative Features Are Out!

There’s a part of Bitbar Testing that most end users never see, the administrative interface. It is using this interface that Private Cloud and Enterprise Cloud administrators are able to manage of what devices are connected to the cloud, what priorities and access every user have, full management for projects, test runs, results and queues – and pretty much everything else that happens in the product.

Until now we have had parts of the administration UI handled by an old UI that wasn’t compelling. Finally, we’re getting rid of this old UI for good! During the last month we have implemented the missing features to the new UI and will cut the cord to the old one in the upcoming release.

Finally I promised some teasers for what’s still cooking in our development labs right now. We are continuing work on our UI by removing unused parts and simplifying the use of remaining parts. We are also bringing new features to our Manual and Automated testing features.

One seriously hot and ground-breaking feature to run and debug your Android and iOS apps on our cloud platform will be soon available.